Tag: first day

This is actually being published on my second day, but I was so tired that I just feel asleep.

Yesterday was the first day of the main course of Maker’s Academy.Even though we’ve seen each other on Slack, many of us hadn’t met yet and so we played some name games(including spirit animals.. didn’t think the sloth would be so high up that list) to get to know each other.

After the game, those of us who had requested a laptop from MA, could go an pick it up and set up our dev environment. They provided us with the useful guide on http://www.preparetocode.io, to install programming essentials that we’ll need for the course, such as XCode, Homebrew, RVM & Ruby. My MacBook had been completely reset, like all of the borrowed ones, so I spent most of my time updating the OS to El Capitain and finished the rest of the setup at home.

When we broke for lunch many of my fellow students went to one of the plenty little food shops/markets. I’m trying to spend as little money as possible and since Makers has a kitchen area/ couple of microwaves I’m bringing in my own food (naturally forgot my food at home on the second day).

After lunch we had an interesting chat session on how to get the most out of Makers. One of the conclusions was that the course is only the precourse to the rest of our lives, as we will learn how to learn how to code—not just coding.

Another concept that stuck with me was, to aim for changing 1% every day at a time. Usually we (i.e. me) want to see results very quickly—obviously that’s because we do something, because we want something out of it. So when we don’t achieve our goal as quickly as desired, we can feel like we’ve reached a plateau or even failed the task and give up. And that’s when the 1% comes in: we need to keep going, we have to aim for only that 1% —even if the 1% improvement only means that that day we found out all the ways that don’t work to solve this or that problem. We now have this knowledge of what doesn’t work, which we didn’t have the day before and which gives us a head start for the next day.

The crucial aspect to keep in mind is to actually track what you’ve done each day, which is something that Makers encourage their students to do – and which is my reason for this blog as well.

I already regret not blogging daily during the precourse as I often felt like I’ve done or achieved nothing, but actually looking back now, I have learnt so much in the past four weeks already. It’s just so easy to forget as you think it’s natural and everyone knows it. (Memo to self: no it’s not, it been four bloody weeks of precourse work!)

So I will be trying to journal / blog as much as possible. I’m not a fan of my writing, so it takes ages for me to put something up (more often than not, I have about 5 million drafts…),anyway I will actually try and use this brain dump. Be warned!